Playboy As Relevant Today As A Nehru Jacket

May 13, 1986|By Steve Daley.

Perhaps it`s nothing more than a coincidence, these economic chicks coming home to roost in the Playboy empire. The business pages are freighted with doom whenever Hugh Hefner`s bosom-based conglomerate is examined. Playboy clubs, the toniest of hangouts when Nehru jackets were in flower, have called in their keys in every spot but a few prairie portages.

Some convenience stores have opted to rid their shelves of Playboy magazine and other glossy adventures in the skin trade, and Hef himself is on the mend from a mild stroke, a condition his allies attribute to a nasty, protracted legal battle over a book by one-time amigo Peter Bogdanovich, a book that painted a grim and sinister picture of life around the Love Grotto. The verdict being meted out here is the cruelest one possible for a man who once offered up a sybaritic lifestyle and several hundred thousand words of personalized boudoir philosophy. The verdict is irrelevance, except at 7-Eleven stores, where pictures of naked ladies can still rattle the Slurpy foundations.

The world is too much with the Playboy philosophy. The sexual revolution, where the publisher once felt himself to be at the barricades, has dissolved in confusion and disillusionment. Hef`s magazine spends as much time grappling with herpes and AIDS, not to mention the pesky demands of the modern woman, as it does with acquisitiveness and consumption. Hey, you couldn`t get to those double-dip women without the right car and the proper boat.

Now comes the current issue of Playboy, the one in which Kathy Shower, 33, mother of two, has been designated ``Playmate of the Year.`` It`s a prize that comes with a $100,000 bonus, a Jaguar XJ6 and a chance to be embarrassed by late-night NBC talk show host David Letterman.

We are told, and must believe, that Shower, who is an actress when she isn`t enjoying perfumed baths and seeking a Dependable Man, was chosen in the first-ever phone-in ``Playmate of the Year`` contest. That`s right, 100,584 telephone balloters pushed Shower, 33, mother of two, beyond the curtain.

For some reason, this victory is being touted as evidence of creeping maturity on the part of the magazine, its readers and its Frankly 60 publisher. Time magazine showed an interest last week, posing mother and children on its inside pages and burbling on about What the Kids Think. On the ``Letterman`` show, there was some discussion of ageism among the undressed.

It`s a fact that over the years Playboy viewers have been offered a monthly ``gatefold`` not much older than your average Kentucky Derby winner. The women of Playboy have, for the most part, been teenagers, or incipient adults. For three decades, the whole lame fantasy was hinged on young women, old wine and sound investments, with a nod toward knowing just how many Oxford shirts to carry along on a business trip.

Now, the fallout from the sexual revolution, as well as an altered image of the publisher in light of the violent death of a former Playmate of the Year, has led to a curious change in the magazine. It has manifested itself in a variety of forms, none more transparent or cynical than Kathy Shower, 33, mother of two. What will the victor do with the spoils? Nothing more exotic than buy a ``little place`` for her family. The whole business smacks of Family Weekly.

It has come to this: In the current issue, when Shower isn`t telling us that all she`s doing with the swag is ``working toward that little place for my children,`` the ``Playboy After Hours`` column is saluting a pair of San Francisco pornographers for making X-rated films in which the participants use condoms, spermicides and latex gloves.

The Playboy philosophy has been rendered schizophrenic. Consider maternal Playmates espousing middle-class values, all the while failing to understand that taking your clothes off for money makes a statement about the value of women that even young children will come to understand.

The same issue devotes page after page to an ``AIDS Update`` and to a protracted discussion of the sexual desires of women. This is the heavy-breathing equivalent of Forbes magazine covering an anarchist`s convention, or TV Guide hiring a book reviewer.

Playboy is lost in a culture it played no small role in shaping. The smug, glandular assurance of bygone days is gone; the happy-go-lucky notion of doing well with the ladies by doing well around the board room is a memory. Woman as plaything is a difficult concept to float in the 1980s, and raising the median age of the naked lady in the middle of the magazine won`t change that.